The Burning Read Online Free PDF

sitting by the bed, wearing a patterned hospital gown. Her feet were bare, plump and pale, with scarlet marks where her boots had rubbed her toes and heels. She looked washed-out, her fair hair lank around her face. Her eyes were red and piggy with tiredness. She was overweight and uneasy in her flimsy hospital gown, pulling the hem down over her knees to try to make it longer. Her mouth looked raw, as if she had been chewing her lips.
    I sat down on the edge of the bed, trying to look unthreatening, and smiled.
    ‘Kelly? I’m Detective Constable Kerrigan. You can call me Maeve. And this is my colleague, DC Langton, who’s going to take some notes for me.’
    Rob had folded himself unobtrusively into a hard chair in the corner of the room. She looked over at him, then up at me blankly. ‘Do you know when my mum is going to get here?’
    ‘No. I’m sorry. I’m sure she’s on her way.’
    ‘She’s bringing my clothes. I ain’t got no clothes. They took them.’
    ‘They’ll need to do a forensic examination of your clothes,’ I explained. Never mind the fact that they would have been unwearable, covered in Vic Blackstaff’s blood.
    ‘I want to go home.’
    ‘Very soon.’ My voice was gentle, as if I was speaking to a child. Which was a good point, actually. ‘How old are you, Kelly?’
    ‘Twenty.’
    Good. No need to wait for a responsible adult to be present. ‘And are you a student? Or working?’
    ‘Student. Catering college.’ She looked a little brighter. ‘I’m in my last year.’
    ‘Do you want to be a chef when you’re finished?’
    She shrugged, looking baffled. ‘Dunno.’
    Enough friendliness. Back to the reason for talking to her in the first place.
    ‘I’d like to talk to you about what happened earlier. We have a few questions, and then we’ll let you go home.’
    She rolled her eyes and said nothing.
    ‘Firstly, I’d just like to reassure you that you aren’t in any kind of trouble. We’re interviewing you as a witness, not a suspect, so please don’t feel that you need to watch what you say. We just want to know what happened before you – er, escaped.’ Somehow, ‘escaped’ sounded better than ‘stabbed a man in the stomach several times’.
    She stirred. ‘Is he dead, then?’
    ‘No. He’s in intensive care. But he’s alive.’
    ‘Sorry to hear that.’ She lifted her chin defiantly, and I thought she was hoping to see shock in my eyes. If so, she was disappointed.
    ‘Right. In your own words, then, can you tell me what happened? Start from the beginning. What time did you head out to the pub?’
    I can’t say that Kelly Staples was an easy interview. Fear made her bolshie. She battled me for the first few minutes, barely answering the questions I asked. But as the story of her night wore on, something seemed to take hold of her, and the monosyllables became sentences, and the sentences became paragraphs, and soon she was talking freely, the words running on like water into a gutter. I hoped Rob could keep up.
    ‘So of course, I’m thinking a minicab will be cheap and I’ll get home quicker. I mean, he was old. He was like my dad or something. Quiet, like. Just … helpful. I thought maybe I reminded him of his daughter and he wanted to see me get back safe. What an idiot. Total idiot. I should have run a mile, not that I could in my boots. I could barely walk.’
    ‘What happened when you got into the car?’
    The words flowed on. His car, and what she’d noticed about it – a faint smell of petrol that had worried her, the more she thought about it. His refusal to take her home the way she knew. The alley he’d found, where he’d promised to turn the car. How dark it had been. How he’d stalled her, telling her the door wouldn’t open from the inside. How he’d sweated. How it was wrong, and what he’d said was wrong, and she’d just known it was him, the Burning Man, so she’d got in before he could do her the way he’d done those other